Real Madrid

After a Saudi takeover helped propel them back to La Liga, the minnows pushed the European champions all the way.

Ramazani too was expected to go – although he insisted he wants to stay on Sunday. This is a club “in construction”, in Rubi’s euphemistic words, the return to primera met with excitement and gratitude but uncertainty too. A club with the resources to get there – far more so than others in segunda – and in theory to stay there. The following season, a goal in the last minute of the last game took the title off Eibar – somehow defeated at already relegated Alcorcón – and sent Almería up as champions instead. What comes next is unclear too, with the club over their salary limit – in part at least because of the cost of promotion. The former minister of sport, chairman of entertainment authority, advisor to the crown and president of the Arabic football federation, he has a fortune of €2,100m. They still don’t have mugs in the club shop, but he did raffle off Audis at games to encourage fans to turn up, paid for coaches like Emery and Quique Setién to come and chat football with him, and got videos from Charlie Sheen, Snoop Dogg, Diego Maradona and Dennis Rodman. How, he didn’t say, but then it was more about the photos, the noise made. Re-founded in its current guise in 1989 and beginning in the local leagues, they reached the first division for the first time in 2007, as UD Almería and with Unai Emery as coach. We have taken the best team in the world to the edge.” There had been a reaction to resist, goalkeeper and DIY enthusiast Fernando Martínez making three hugely impressive saves and Madrid racking up 12 corners and 17 shots in the first half, seeing a goal disallowed for offside too – but the storm had abated a little. After seven years away from the first division, it took less than seven minutes for Almería to score there, earlier than anyone had done against Madrid in 15 years. Almería had returned to primera for the first time since 2015, faced Real Madrid in their opening game, and proprietor and president Turki Al-Sheikh, the minister in charge of entertainment at the Saudi royal court, didn’t have much faith. Which is one way to describe Largie Ramazani. Because now, five days later, Al-Sheikh was sitting alongside Florentino Pérez in a plush sofa a little out of place in a football stadium and watching the impossible happen below, like some act of divine intervention.